Monday morning arrived, quiet and ordinary, the kind of morning that gave no hint of what had shifted underneath it. Eric surfaced slowly from sleep, drawn up by the faint sound of something cooking down the hall. When he finally sat up, his gaze was hazy and unfocused, blinking against the light like a man still half-drunk on rest.
"I don't think I've ever slept that well in my life."
It wasn't an exaggeration, not even slightly.
His mind had been running on fumes for days now, stretched thin under a weight that never seemed to ease, no matter how much sleep he got. Rest usually helped, but only ever partially, taking the edge off without ever really clearing it. Last night had been different. Something in him had gone quiet in a way it hadn't in years, and he genuinely struggled to find words for it.
He rose from the bed and stretched, working the stiffness out of his shoulders and back for a long moment before the smell finally pulled his attention fully awake. Something sweet, something familiar, drifting in from the kitchen. Ruby, as always, had been up before him, already at work over the stove.
He stood there for a second, just listening to the faint clatter of pans, and let himself sit with what he now understood clearly, no ambiguity left in it at all.
He didn't love her. Not the way he once believed he had, not the way the word was supposed to mean. But he still cared for her, quietly, genuinely, in whatever way remained. Her happiness still mattered to him. Seeing her smile still eased something in his chest, small and real, even now. That was simply the whole of it, though. Nothing more sat beneath it. If circumstances ever pulled them apart, if he had to leave and build some entirely different life elsewhere, he knew, with unsettling certainty, that he wouldn't carry a single regret out the door with him.
To most people, a realization like that would have felt like loss. For Eric, it felt like relief.
It wasn't only relief either. The clarity had done something deeper, loosening a knot that had sat in his chest for years, tightening his grip on his own Aura in a way nothing else had managed. Where he used to feel weighed down, uncertain, constantly circling the same unresolved question about what he actually felt for her, that space in his mind was simply empty now. Clean. Available for something else.
Most people, losing the love of a partner, someone they'd shared real intimacy and years of history with, would have spiraled into grief, maybe depression, maybe both. But none of that touched Eric, not really, because the truth was that Ruby had never been the point to begin with. He had married her, from the very start, as an anchor. A fixed point to measure himself against while he worked through the far harder task of actually understanding who he was.
Understanding, identification, acceptance. Three words that formed the entire foundation of the method behind control at the Lysi Nova rank.
The first step demanded he understand his own morality, laying out every principle he refused to compromise on, a foundation that stayed fixed even long after the step itself was technically complete. The second step went further, asking him to look inward and map out everything else. His personality. What he loved, what he couldn't stand. How he actually felt about himself, stripped of performance. What the people closest to him meant to him, honestly, without flattering himself in the process. What he wanted out of the life he was building, and a hundred smaller questions besides.
Eric had been stuck on that second step for eight long years.
Only after entering his domain of emotions and sitting across from his own emotional spirit had he finally broken through it, watching his control climb from sixty percent to sixty-five for the first time in nearly a decade. It hadn't come easily. Plenty had kept him stuck there far longer than it should have: his history, the state of his own mind, a quiet, stubborn reluctance to actually move forward even when the path was visible. But the world around him had grown dangerous enough, unpredictable enough, that standing still was no longer something he could afford. His survival now hinged directly on how strong he could become, and no ally, however powerful, could substitute for that.
He could count Divine Karma among his allies. Lumenia. Even the Church of Serenity, if it came to that. But none of them, not one, could stand in for his own strength when the moment actually came.
In this world, a person could only ever really depend on themselves. Everyone else was, in the end, unreliable, however good their intentions.
It was a bitter thing to realize this late, and bitterer still that he'd only truly understood it after already finding himself in the exact situation that demanded it. He had come here, to this point, this life, by his own choice, technically. He'd followed the voice in his head, listened to its quiet guidance, and walked this path on the strength of its hints alone.
That much was true.
But that voice had guided him since the very moment he first awakened as an Aura user, years and years now, and if it had ever wanted him dead, it had certainly had ample opportunity long before this. From what he'd gathered over time, it held some measure of control over his body already, enough that seizing his mind outright, if it wanted to, likely wouldn't have posed much of a challenge at all.
Another point is that Eric had tried not to do what the voice instructed him to do or hinted at. The answer had always been disastrous for him. The incident during his advancement to Lysi Nova was a result of his own ignorance, immaturity, and not listening to the voice.
And lastly, he needs answers. He wants to know many things. What is this voice? What is its origin? What does it want? He wants to know it.
Eric drew his liquid out slowly, and the moment it left his palm, he noticed the difference before he even fully registered it.
His Gravitation Aura, usually a clean, familiar pink, had shifted, deepened, closer to rose now, threaded through with fine black particles suspended and drifting within it, dense in a way it hadn't been before. He turned his hand slightly, watching it move, thicker, heavier, more resistant against the air than he remembered.
The control's already changing it, he thought, something quietly satisfied settling under the unease still lingering from the dream. Danger and opportunity, apparently, tended to arrive wrapped around each other more often than not.
He shook the thought off and let the liquid dissolve back into his skin before heading for the bathroom, brushing his teeth, showering, dressing in the plain clothes he kept for mornings like this.
It was Monday. Technically, that meant work. Realistically, it meant nothing of the sort.
Today was the day he helped Voyage kill a healthy teenager.
He didn't dress it up in his own head; no point pretending the phrasing was anything other than exactly what it was. Voyage needed to grow, needed a body's worth of blood to speed that process along, and the gang he'd built to supply kidnapped children had already collapsed once, thanks entirely to Eric stumbling onto that exact case. He'd rescued those kids, traced the thread back to Voyage himself, confronted him directly, and gotten a full, unbothered confession in return.
The only real fix after that had been to help him finish the job properly, once, cleanly, rather than let this drag out indefinitely.
Eric didn't particularly care how many kids Voyage kidnapped or killed on principle. What he cared about was that the cases kept landing on his own desk, and normal police work would never actually catch someone like Voyage. No trail, no evidence, nothing an ordinary investigation could follow. Which meant more missing kids, more rescues, more cycles of the same problem repeating indefinitely unless someone actually closed the loop.
Better to end it in one clean motion and move on.
There was also the practical side of it. Aura stones. Contribution points. Divine Karma, whatever its current instability, still counted among the four great bodies, still carried weight and resources that might matter enormously later, even if their foundation currently looked shakier than the others.
He currently had fifty-three Aura stones sitting untouched, gathering dust for lack of anything urgent to spend them on. No active fights draining his reserves, no forging materials he needed right now. But once his control hit a hundred percent, his Aura would name exactly what resources he needed to push toward Hypernova, and Aura stones would almost certainly top that list. Better to stockpile now than scramble later. The resources for that jump wouldn't come cheap, and somewhere in there sat a ritual too, one he had absolutely no details on yet.
He walked out to the dining table just as Ruby set a plate of pancakes in front of him, knife and fork laid neatly beside it, her whole face bright with the small satisfaction of having made something he'd actually enjoy.
Eric smiled at her, warm and unforced, and ate in comfortable quiet, complimenting the food between bites often enough that her cheeks stayed faintly pink through most of the meal.
Once finished, he kissed her, pulled on his dark blue uniform, and stepped out the door, already fully prepared to lie about exactly where the day was actually going to take him.
He stopped at Max's door next, right beside his own, and knocked twice.
What answered wasn't a voice. It was the unmistakable sound of something heavy hitting the floor, followed by a scramble of movement and Zoe's voice, sharp and urgent, hissing at Max to move faster.
Eric caught every bit of it clearly, thanks to the small, useful uniquenesses of the Energy Pathway, and stood there in the hallway with his arms crossed, entirely unbothered, waiting.
"Bastard! Eric's here! Go, quickly, don't act weird, or he'll know we were—" She caught herself, cheeks flaring an even deeper red. "Never mind! Just go, go, go!"
She shoved Max bodily out the door, waved brightly at Eric with a smile that didn't quite match the sweat still clinging to her forehead or the way her chest heaved with each breath, and slammed the door shut the second Max cleared the threshold.
Eric watched the whole thing unfold without so much as a raised eyebrow.
He gave Max a small nod, and the two of them fell into step together, heading for the elevator. Zoe's flushed face, the sweat, the ragged breathing, none of it registered to Eric as anything worth remarking on. He simply filed it away under the general category of things Max and Zoe do that are none of my business and moved on, his mind already drifting toward more practical matters.
On the ride down, the two of them fell into conversation through Meditation Aura, silent and steady beneath the surface while their bodies walked side by side without a word passing between them out loud.
Eric updated Max on his own progress. The state of his Domain of Emotions. How close he'd come to fully understanding it. The strange, unsettling version of himself he'd glimpsed right at the edge of leaving that inner space, something he still hadn't fully made sense of.
Max, in turn, rattled off an equally long update of his own. How close he was getting to full control over his Aura. Some story about his nights with Zoe that Eric let wash past him without much interest. A few genuinely useful observations he'd picked up wandering the streets over the past few days, tucked in casually between everything else, as Max tended to do.
Most of it was harmless noise, Eric knew that well by now, but he'd long since learned to listen anyway. Max's rambling occasionally buried something worth hearing beneath all the filler, and it cost Eric nothing to pay attention.
They kept walking, and it was somewhere along that stretch of sidewalk that Eric's attention snagged on a small round table outside a café, where three elderly women sat with their tea, deep in conversation.
"Caramel, dear, speaking of which, have you heard about this 'Helping Beggars' business?"
"Oh, thank goodness, I was just about to ask you two the same thing! These past couple of days I've seen so many of them out and about, helping people left and right. It's like they're competing with each other over who can be the most helpful!"
"You've noticed it too? On the bus, no less! They've been practically fighting each other over who gets to offer me their seat first."
"I actually asked one of them about it, you know. Apparently they're some sort of group, all brought together by a man named Mike Jackson. Pays them to go out and help people. The more good deeds they rack up, the more they earn from him. Though none of them seem to know much else about the man himself."
"Mike Jackson? Wait." The second woman's brow furrowed, tapping one finger against her teacup. "That name sounds familiar somehow. What does he look like?"
"From what the beggars told me, tall, very graceful, that sort of effortlessly charming presence about him. Pale skin, blue eyes, wears a little silver cross earring, dressed impeccably, like everything's tailor-made just for him."
The third woman's teacup nearly slipped straight out of her hand.
"Wait, I know exactly who that is! He's the handsome young man who helped me across the street the other day! Such lovely manners. To think he's running an entire little charity operation behind it all, imagine that."
Eric, still walking, caught every word of it from a comfortable distance, and had to bite back a small, satisfied laugh threatening to slip loose.
Well. Looks like the little organization I put together is starting to make a name for itself.
He'd taken real inspiration from Voyage in setting the whole thing up, once he'd properly understood the limitations of farming good deeds entirely on his own. A full day's worth of effort had only pushed the Imperator's Cross from ten percent up to forty, and while he'd learned plenty from that stretch, he'd also learned exactly where the ceiling sat if he insisted on doing every good deed personally.
The workaround had been simple enough once he'd actually thought it through properly. He didn't need to be the one performing every kind act himself, not as long as the good deeds themselves still got done. So he'd built the structure around that single idea: pay people to help others, reward them properly for it, and let the good deeds accumulate indirectly through hands other than his own.
The more people helped, the more everyone earned. Simple. Efficient. And apparently, judging by the little scene playing out over tea just now, already spreading further than he'd expected this quickly.
All of the actual logistics behind the operation were handled by Uriel. This Lysi Nova-rank angel spirit had been assigned the task of distributing funds based on how much help each beggar actually delivered, giving them just enough money to go out and do good on their own terms.
Some of them, predictably, had taken that money and spent it on drugs or cigarettes instead. Uriel had killed every single one of them without hesitation.
Eric didn't lose any sleep over that. A few dozen wasted lives, in his view, weren't much of a loss at all, just a handful of people who'd been given a real opportunity and chosen to burn it instead. People didn't end up poor because of the world around them, not really, not in his experience. They ended up poor because of the habits they let control them. If anything, he considered Uriel's culling a mild public service, clearing out the dead weight before it dragged the whole operation down with it.
The survivors weren't perfect either. They fought amongst themselves constantly, squabbling over who got to help which stranger first, occasionally making enough of a scene to cause real trouble in the streets. Eric couldn't do much about that particular problem. Actually training a group of undisciplined beggars into anything resembling an organized team would cost him time and resources he didn't consider worth spending, not for marginal gains like that.
Still, the numbers didn't lie. The rate of good deeds trickling into the Imperator's Cross was slow, admittedly, but volume made up for what it lacked in polish. In just two days, the cross had already climbed to forty-two percent. As long as he still held the relic, Eric planned to keep expanding this little operation for as long as it kept paying off.
He could have simply funneled his own savings into charity directly, of course, converting his Aura stones into hard currency and dumping the proceeds somewhere impactful. He had no intention of doing that. He needed those funds reserved for later, and there were more efficient ways to farm good deeds that didn't require draining his own resources dry.
There was a second benefit buried in all of this too, one he valued almost as much as the good deeds themselves: keeping Uriel occupied and at a distance meant keeping Uriel out of his and Max's business. Eric had never fully trusted angel spirits, and he trusted the Church backing them even less. But the deeper he leaned on this relic to grow, the more he found himself needing to use it, needing Uriel's cooperation to make it work at scale. That uneasy tension sat with him constantly, a low, persistent unease he never quite shook.
Even so, he thought. One cannot achieve great things without taking a few risks along the way.
Eventually, the two of them reached the police station.
Eric didn't go inside. He sent Max in alone to meet Claude instead, having already worked out, with fairly high confidence, that the strange fleshy orb embedded somewhere in Claude's body was connected directly to the Lysi Nova running the organization, pulling strings behind the scenes. He'd gotten careless once already, letting himself get too close, and it had cost him, revealing his location and handing the enemy a clean opportunity to set a trap for him. He'd only survived that mistake because the enemy in question happened to sit below him in rank. Against anyone stronger, that carelessness likely would have killed him outright.
So why send Max in his place, if the risk was real?
It wasn't that Eric considered Max expendable. Quite the opposite. He simply trusted, with near total certainty, that even if the enemy managed to track Max down, even if they caught him at his most careless, wandering around with his guard fully lowered, they still wouldn't dare make a move against him.
After all, Eric thought, he's the most special one of all of us.
Max emerged from the station a few minutes later, rattling off the patrol route they'd been assigned for the day, two body cameras held up in one hand as he walked.
Back when they'd first joined the force, some minor bureaucratic oversight had let them slip through without being issued the standard equipment, leaving them free to move however they pleased during patrols. That loophole had apparently closed now. From here on, every step they took while on duty would be recorded, whatever illusion of freedom they'd been enjoying quietly revoked.
Eric found the whole thing almost laughably simple to deal with. A pair of ordinary cameras, against two Aura users? These weren't even a minor inconvenience, let alone an actual obstacle.
He took both devices from Max's hand as they walked a short distance away from the station, toward the section of the city they were meant to patrol that day. Once they'd put enough distance behind them, Eric drew on his Meditation Aura, reached out to contact Mr. Clown, and teleported both cameras away, sending them off somewhere else entirely before either of them had to worry about being watched at all.
...
In the middle of the high school field, Mr. Clown was sprinting flat-out, laughing his head off, with Adrian tearing after him at full speed, red-faced and furious.
Right in the middle of the chase, Mr. Clown's Meditation Aura flickered faintly, Eric's message arriving mid-stride, the details of the task settling into his mind without so much as breaking his pace. He lifted both cameras still clutched in one gloved hand, injected a thread of Fooling Aura into them without even glancing down, and teleported them off toward Eric and Max in the same breath.
Then he looked back over his shoulder, grinning wide.
"What's wrong, little boy? Tired already? Hahahahaha!"
"I'm going to KILL you," Adrian wheezed, lungs burning, legs pumping as hard as they possibly could.
"Ohhh, scary! Truly terrifying! A little Nova threatening an Auri Nova, be still my beating, painted-on heart!" Mr. Clown clutched dramatically at his own chest without slowing down even slightly, weaving effortlessly around a lamppost like it was nothing.
Adrian had been given, by his own count, at least six perfectly good opportunities to actually catch him in the last five minutes alone. Every single one had slipped through his fingers, the man practically dancing out of reach each time, bending and twisting his body in ways that shouldn't have been physically possible, always just barely, mockingly out of range.
It was infuriating. Adrian kept running anyway, jaw set, refusing to give up.
Mr. Clown's black eyes flickered with something delighted, and without warning he spun on his heel, released a thin wash of his own Aura directly behind him, and kept moving.
Adrian's foot came down squarely in the middle of it before he even noticed anything had changed.
The world blurred for half a second. When it settled again, two Mr. Clowns were standing a short distance ahead of him, identical down to the last stitch, one veering left, one veering right, both grinning at him with the same infuriating smile.
"Oh, come on!" Adrian shouted, skidding to a stop, glancing rapidly between the two of them.
"Pick wisely!" both Mr. Clowns called out in unison, then burst into identical laughter.
Adrian groaned, picked the one veering left entirely at random, and threw himself back into the chase.
"Wrong one, by the way!" the real Mr. Clown's voice floated back from somewhere off to the right, gleeful and unbothered.
"I HATE YOU!"
"Love you too! Now, focus, focus, you're doing this all wrong. Stop just running in a straight line like some kind of overeager puppy. Feel where I am. You've got a Destruction Aura sitting right there in your chest doing absolutely nothing useful. Use it!"
Adrian faltered mid-stride. "Use it how?!"
"Figure it out! That's half the fun!" Mr. Clown's illusion dissolved into a puff of nothing the second Adrian's attention drifted, the real one still somewhere ahead, laughing.
Gritting his teeth, Adrian reached inward instead of just chasing blindly, feeling for that low, simmering pressure he'd learned to recognize as his own Aura. He pushed a thin thread of it outward instead of holding it in, aiming it loosely at the space just ahead of where Mr. Clown's laughter kept echoing from.
The ground there cracked, faint and small, just a hairline fracture spreading a few feet across the pavement, but enough to make Mr. Clown actually stumble a half-step for the first time all afternoon.
"Ohoho!" Mr. Clown's grin sharpened with genuine surprise now, glancing back properly. "Well, look at that! Maybe you're not a complete lost cause after all."
Adrian, despite the burn in his legs, felt a small, fierce grin spread across his own face. "Do that again, and I'll actually get you!"
"Try it, little destroyer!"
The chase carried on, louder and messier than before, Adrian throwing clumsy little cracks of destructive Aura in increasingly random directions, Mr. Clown weaving and cackling and occasionally shouting out half-useful advice between fits of laughter, the whole scene dissolving into something closer to genuine training disguised, badly, as an afternoon of mockery.
Meanwhile, on Eric and Max's end, the face cams had already been swapped and returned within a single minute. The devices could no longer register Auras at all now; any trace of one simply skipped over cleanly in the footage, and even switched off, they'd keep quietly recording, just an unremarkable loop of two officers walking a perfectly ordinary patrol route.
Max headed off toward his actual assigned patrol without needing to bother with any of this himself. Eric turned his own face cam on, then off again almost immediately, tucking it into his pocket with the same flat, practiced indifference he handled most administrative nonsense with. He said a quick goodbye to Max and ducked into a narrow alley a block later, vanishing from sight before teleporting straight to an abandoned house on the far side of the district.
Inside, he knelt down and pried open a hidden panel beneath the floorboards, pulling out the folded clothes of Mike Jackson from where they'd been carefully tucked away. He changed quickly, drew on Truth, and felt his features shift and settle into that familiar, practiced disguise. His police uniform and the now-useless face cam went into the same hidden box, sealed away beneath the floor once more.
Now, he thought, straightening his collar, time to go adopt Voyage.
...
Across the city, inside the quiet, sterile hush of a hospital nursery, Voyage sat propped up in her small crib, dark eyes far too alert, far too knowing, for an infant his supposed age.
His gaze drifted, slow and deliberate, toward the window.
Toward the street outside. Toward a particular direction, far beyond what any ordinary baby should have been capable of focusing on.
At that same moment, several blocks away, Eric stopped mid-step on the sidewalk, an unshakable prickle crawling up the back of his neck.
He turned his head, slow and measured, toward the hospital rising in the distance.
For a long, silent moment, neither of them moved.